Screening tonight at SIFF is a film that deserves more attention, With A Little Help From Myself.

Set in the suburbs of Paris, and directed by François Dupeyron, who is known in this part of the world as the director of Monsieur Ibrahim, Myself introduces a new figure into a stream of cinema that began with Shohei Imamura's Insect Woman. Seen in the state of this type of woman is the state of a society or nation. This type of woman is always in the twilight of legitimate forms of self-exploitation and illegitimate forms (prostitution). Some astrophysicists describe a star as something that only knows how to generate energy. That is how they live and, ultimately, what causes them to explode or implode. Similarly, the insect woman only knows how to survive. She will do anything just to keep up and going. She is all instinct, all the root will to live, the force that sees death as the only obstacle and avoids it at any cost. Fassbinder's Maria Braun is such a woman (she represents West German's biological imperative). And so is Sonia—the first African woman to enter this deep theme in world cinema. (One might argue that Ousmane Sembene's Faat Kiné is the first African representation of this figure, but she is not. Faat struggles to compete with other males in a patriarchal society but she does not struggle to stay alive, to eat, grab anything that can sustain her body.)

The insect woman is all about the body, which is why the climatic scene in Myself is of an old white man spending the last night of his long life on earth worshiping the black body of the African insect woman. He knows and admires its devouring and loving power. He is dead by dawn. The scene is dark and disturbing. But it is precisely these dark and disturbing places that the insect woman takes us. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, a white man returns home from the war only to find his wife selling her body to a black American man. He kills that black man. He is sent to prison. The insect woman does not cease to devour and love life. The nation's respectable identity rises from these muddy and violent situations. Myself, however, represents a new kind of nation: the multitude. Sonia is the the stateless nation of immigrants, global drifters, international dreamers.

The defining existential moment for the immigrant is the moment of crossing a border. This crossing demands the root strength of an insect's will to live. Sonia has a big laugh.